


You Don't Know it Yet

by TUNiU



Series: Victor [1]
Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: POV Second Person, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 13:34:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18344717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TUNiU/pseuds/TUNiU
Summary: Victor meets a street urchin in Cartagena. This will change his life.





	You Don't Know it Yet

In the decades to come, you sometimes forget that when you met, Nathan was just a child by most decent countries' standards. Too much time spent in not-decent places, chased by armed conscripts too young to shave have skewed your perspective. A boy is old enough to steal and live on the streets—use the threat of pederasty to garner sympathy from the police--he's old enough to be a man. (Except no, he's not. Not at all. The shaking of his hand holding the gun on the rooftop proved that.)

You're forty years old and children have never featured in your daydreams about the perfect life. But then some urchin picks your pocket and you miss the second lift. You miss it. You haven't missed a lift in years. Marlowe smacks the boy, and he doesn't flinch or cry. There's no lesson learned here (your father taught you to respect him with the back of his hand and you’re none the worse for it) the kid leans into the next slap, expecting it. But it's just Marlowe and her bitter anger. It's brutality. There’s nothing to teach. You just see a boy expecting to be hit for no reason.

This is the first time of many you will save Nathan Drake, though you don't know it, yet. Don't know you will spend the rest of your life loving this boy as a son, leading him on adventures, bailing him out of jail, cleaning up his wounds. You don't know you will be best man at his wedding, business partner to his brother, grandfather to his daughter.

When he runs, Marlowe's men chase him, with guns. In that moment, as you follow up the stairs to stop this madness, you quit whatever job she wanted you for. Maybe it's what you saw in the war, but you've always believed there are lines in life: 'no means no', and 'never hurt a kid'.

He's spry, and agile, and climbing roofs like a monkey, and there's a moment, when you see some random suited thug about to stomp on the boy's handhold that you have to intervene. You wrestle with that jackass, and tell the kid to run and you hope he makes it to where ever his escape is. But there are so many men, and now they're shooting and you know how this will end. Marlowe will get her ring, and the Cartagena paupers' grave will get one more unnamed body.

You're forty years old and you leap across rooftops like a man half your age, trying to catch up to save this boy because if he dies and you did nothing, you couldn't live with yourself. By some divine grace, you save him. He's cornered, crawling away towards a roof edge, with a gun in his hand he will never shoot (not yet, but you're going to train him up right) and another random thug is pointing a gun at him. You can't hear them, but you can see the kid’s hand shaking as it holds the gun. The man aims, and the kid closes his eyes. Because he’s just a kid. You shoot the sonovabitch who would dare kill a kid.

He barely comes up to your shoulders, he's maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet, and already he's held a gun. Oh, he's not strong enough to shoot, not yet. But he will be. Rule one of this life: someone tries to shoot you, you shoot back. Already you're planning how you'll teach him to shoot--empty beer bottles in a junk yard--just like your father taught you before the war. He doesn't know you from Adam but he trusts you enough to let you take his gun from his hand (he will always trust you to take a gun from his hand, as a scared child in Cartagena, and as a scared man in Iram-of-the-Pillars.) and lead him safely off the rooftop.

You hotwire one of Marlowe's vehicles--there's at least one man who won't need it now, maybe two if the thug the kid threw off the roof doesn't survive. You don't mention this. He doesn't need to know he might have killed someone.

The kid is quiet as he sits in the passenger seat. The tank is almost full, and there's nothing you need enough that can't be left behind. He's gripping his satchel tight enough you know everything he owns is in that small bag, so you put the pedal down and drive for hours until you're on the outskirts of town.  The streets here are more dust than stone, the buildings plain adobe.

When you're sure Marlowe didn't follow you, or rather didn't follow the ring hanging around the boy's neck, you stop at a bar. The bar's windows are grimy with road dust and spiderwebs, there's gang graffiti on the street lamps. You've never been to this part of town, can't know the crowd, but there's a bicycle leaning on a nearby fire hydrant. It's pink with tassels on the handlebars. You figure that's an indicator of relative safety.

Once he has the prospect of food, and a semblance of trust, the kid tells you some bullshit story about being a descendant of Sir Francis Drake. He tells it well, with conviction and belief. He calls himself Nathan Drake. That's why you don't believe him. What kind of street urchin tells a strange man his real name? As long as the boy will reliably answer to Nathan Drake, it's as good a name as any, and a man has a right to whatever secrets he can keep safe in this shit world. (You will never know his birth name.) The papers you get forged and the digital trail you pay a fortune to get hacked into databases will list him as Nathan Drake. (His brother is also a Drake. His wife is a Drake. His daughter is a Drake.) Whoever he was died before you ever met him.

The ring he claims as his birthright is a key to a cipher created by Francis Drake leading to some treasure hoard. Except Marlowe has the cipher. And you don’t see her cooperating with the boy who stole the key from under her nose anytime soon. (It will be twenty years before you learn the truth about Francis Drake’s journey through the East Indies and the so-called treasure.)

(It wasn’t worth the wait.)

(The real treasure was Nathan)

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea where this came from or why it's in second-person. But I'm tired of letting my ideas die for lack of writing them down. I used to write constantly, with notebooks of fics and ideas, but the skill withered away, because I thought it wasn't good enough or long enough. So here, let me share whatever I can eke out. Please.


End file.
